In a customer call center, a call center agent communicates with customers through both in-bound and out-bound calls. This communication is through a voice connection to a telephone switch that the call center agent controls from a workstation. At the workstation, the call center agent typically uses a variety of instruments to interface with application modules to obtain necessary information for the call center agent to service the customer, monitor and record certain statistics relating to the call center agent's performance, and display images or hard copies of documents relating to the customer's account. Additionally, the call center agent uses a variety of interfaces with host data processing systems and internal communication systems at the call center to properly respond to the customer calls. At a bare minimum, the call center agent uses separate telephone instruments to service voice transactions and a personal computer or similar computer device to process data transactions. This makes responding to a high volume of calls essentially prohibitive. If there were a way that a call center agent could avoid having to use so many different sources of information to respond to customer calls, the overall efficiency of the call center agent would improve. This efficiency improvement could cause significant cost reductions in the daily operation of a customer call center.
Consequently, there is a need for a method and system that permit a call center agent to avoid using of separate telephone instruments to handle voice transactions and other systems in handling data transactions associated with customer calls.